Figures of Speech

Metaphors and Similes

Personification: Making the World Human

Practice

Poetry: Seeing Likenesses

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We all make comparisons in our everyday speech:

Poetry is alive because poets make imaginative comparisons.

Figures of Speech

“The dancer was spinning like a top.”

“My little sister is a real doll!”

Figures of Speech

Poets have a special talent for getting us to look at things differently.

Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed; . . .

William Shakespearefrom Sonnet 18

Imaginative comparisons between unlike things are called figures of speech.

There are three main figures of speech:

Figures of Speech

metaphors similes

personification

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If you say, “My brother—that rat—got me in trouble again,”

A metaphor is a kind of comparison that directly compares one thing to another.

Metaphors and Similes

You are saying your brother is a rat.

you are making a metaphor.

Here are the first three lines from Alfred Noyes’s poem “The Highwayman”:

Metaphors and Similes

What metaphor for the wind do you see?

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,…

What was the moon?

What was the road?

A simile is the comparison of one thing to another unlike thing using specific words, such as

If you say your brother is “like a rat” or “as sneaky as a rat,” you are making a simile.

Metaphors and Similes

like

as

resembles

Poets try to find unusual metaphors and similes.

Metaphors and Similes

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Duty is a bee, serving the flower-clients along her route.

My thoughts are perched on a high twig.

“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind”

—William Wordsworth

“The swan flirted, shyly turning her head.”

“The sky wept buckets all day.”

Personification: Making the World Human

What are the sky and the swan being compared to?

Can a sky weep? Can a swan flirt?

Personification is a type of comparison that speaks of something that is not human as if it had human abilities and reactions.

Personification: Making the World Human

But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;The little waves, with their soft, white hands,Efface the footprints in the sands, . . .

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow“The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls”

Here’s part of a play by William Shakespeare.

Let’s Try It

Practice

1. What comparisons are made here?

2. What figure of speech are they?

All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely

players;They have their exits and their

entrances,And one man in his time plays many

parts,His acts being seven ages.

Let’s Try It

And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,Sighing like furnace, with a woeful balladMade to his mistress’ eyebrow.

Practice

3. What comparisons are made here?

4. What figure of speech are they? How do you know?

Poetry: Seeing Likenesses

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